“Political Pluralism and the Management of Diversity : some Challenges Facing Algeria”
Ahmed Thabet,
Professor of Political Science,
Faculty of Economics, Cairo University, Egypt,
Fax: 00202-5711020, Tel.: 00202-5873581
E-mail: athabet86@hotmail.comAbstract
More developed understanding of the extent prevalent strategies to manage sufficiently societal diversity in Africa, requires methodology and explanation so appropriate to African indigenous experiences. A different intellectual framework, emanating from within the Southern cultures and knowledge systems, must be used in analysing the complex realities of, and transnational pathways to, social change. The value to be used should emanate from philosophical underpinnings that are holistic and not characterized by narrow and rigid ideologies.
Of major innovations new trends of democracy have witnessed are two: authority delegation to local, provincial councils, and promoting democracy by mixing it with non-Western cultures. Unlike the West where civil society organisations arose to check the totalitarian state, those in Africa historically evolved as “shadow states” performing for the individual and the group functions mainly of a social welfare nature which the state could not perform. Analysing the strategies Algerian state maintained to manage ethnic and language cleavages, in this context, may explain limits of success or failure.